Posts by Lauren Ipsum
I would say it's dependent on context. There are times when you cannot "bury the lede," to borrow a term from journalism (and that is the correct spelling), and there are times when it's okay to pu...
Poet e e cummings and singer k.d. lang are both referenced in all lowercase letters. Singer Prince famously went by an unpronounceable symbol for a few years (which many wrote as The Artist Formerl...
The dash may be European formatting, but it's not standard in English-speaking countries. Some information on the dialogue dash here: Using dashes in writing dialogue However, if your readers are ...
Strike a balance. Your character who speaks in dialect uses different vocabulary, word order, grammar than the person who speaks in the Received Standard version of the language. Non-Dialect Amer...
A novella may do better as a self-pub or a e-book than a trade paperback. Or you could write a few novellas and combine them into one larger format, like Stephen King did with Different Seasons. No...
If you're doing essentially the same thing as 90% of your genre (flying people achieve great heights immediately, people with superpowers never have issues with getting fuel for those powers, someo...
Skip the peaceful period. If there's no conflict, there's nothing to write about. Go to "Part II" of your book. Open with the characters having a party to celebrate two decades of peace. In the mi...
"What the protagonist doesn't know" is an obstacle. Each obstacle should be overcome in order to advance the plot. You may have to plot out your entire story and work backwards, seeing where each ...
1) A similar but not exact iteration of this is the Water! trilogy by Gael Baudino. It's not well-known and I found the experimental format exhausting. Still, Your Mileage May Vary. In the three ...
There's no difference — As, Bs, Cs, Ds, Fs. No italic, no bold, no apostrophe.
I call this a "grains of rice" problem. It's from a question over on Graphic Design SE, How do I draw rice grains in Photoshop?, but the idea is the same. If you want to draw grains of rice, you ha...
Re compatibility: Scrivener allows you to export in many formats; the company makes a point of not holding you hostage to proprietary software. One of my favorite features of Scrivener is the orga...
If the errors make the book unusable — for example, switching "row" and "column" makes what you're reading unworkable — I'd look for a way to contact the publisher and inform it about the errors. T...
What you are describing is being a discovery writer, also called a pantser (as in "by the seat of your pants"). The purpose of an outline is to establish a coherent linear structure for your stor...
Two suggestions: 1) The reader knows that the killer is after Pete the Protagonist, right? So the killer is stalking Pete, in increasingly tense scenarios. Each time the killer gets closer but doe...
I don't want to embellish, and it would go against my ethics to stray into creative writing in a non-fiction account I think you're off-base here. Memoirs (which is what you're writing) are n...
Overbearing pride. He's done a lot. He's seen a lot. He has a lot of experience. He's very accomplished, and he thinks anyone would benefit from learning from him. The "nostalgia" and "being over...
There are two kinds of writers: plotters and discovery writers. Discovery writers sit down and just type, literally "discovering" what happens as they go, and then must go back and impose a struct...
1) Mercedes Lackey famously rewrote her first trilogy seventeen times before it was published. You will not ruin your idea by writing it. 2) Even if you get your "first million terrible words" ou...
But it's not passive voice, not really. You've just elided the subject because it's the subject of multiple clauses. Let's say your original sentence is: Born in a land without justice, sodden...
I wanna write modern fantasy that just happened to have a lesbian character. So, do that. When the love interest enters the scene, your protagonist is interested. That's all. That's what you...
In the Hero's Journey, this is called The Ordinary World, and it's important to establish. The Ordinary World is what the Hero must leave to go on the Journey. This World may be good or bad, whole...
If the character is narrating his story to the reader, then he's speaking to the reader, so that problem is solved. If he doesn't know where he is, then he has to figure it out from what he can ta...
Like anything else, if it's critical to the plot, or if it would be very weird to leave it out, then put it in. If it's unnecessary or there's enough passage of time offscreen to cover it, leave it...
If you're referring to older, unsophisticated stories, where the author was being quite straightforward, then "clichéd" is probably what you want. (Plain old unsophisticated works too, or broad or ...
